Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.
Research for this article was funded by a grant from the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/H018964/1). We are very grateful to the Council for its generous support. Thanks are also due to Sue-Ann Harding, Piers Robinson, Mark D. Steinberg, and anonymous reviewers of Slavic Review for their valuable comments and suggestions.
1. REN TV Nedelia, 18 December 2010, reported that there were demonstrations in support of the Moscow rioters in five cities across Russia. See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=4&layout=blog&Itemid=9&limitstart=50 (last accessed 21 September 2012)
2. Following an investigation into the riots, in April 2011 a Coordinating Council on Nation-Related Politics was established and the Movement against Illegal Immigration banned. In the state-controlled media, the period of intense coverage was succeeded by longer, televised discussions on the deep-seated interethnic tensions that Manezhnaia exposed. See, e.g., Poedinok, 14 April 2011, and Tern vremenem, Rossiia, 17January 2011.
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18. For further details, see Andrew Macdowell, “Anti-Roma Riots Engulf Bulgaria after Teenage Tragedy,” The Independent, 28 September 2011, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/antiroma-riots-engulf-bulgaria-after-teenage-tragedy-2361944.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).
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20. Claire Cozens, “French TV Boss Admits Censoring Coverage,” The Guardian, 10 November 2005.
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24. Our use of the concepts we deploy corresponds to that assigned to them in Norman Fairclough's Media Discourse (London, 1995). We do not offer a data-driven, media content analysis aimed at identifying verifiable trends measured against normative beliefs about how the objective “realities” they reflect should have been reported. Nor, by contrast, do we relativize all knowledge. Rather, we follow Richard Sennett's pragmatic formulation, aspiring to intersubjective “plausibility” by “showing the logical connections among phenomena” corroborated via the textual features that we intuit. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, 2002), 43. We adopt no normative principles other than broad adherence to a media pluralism compatible with the promotion of mutual tolerance and respect.
25. Sarah Oates and her colleagues examine Russian television news framing of terrorism and elections. But theirs is a largely quantitative method involving the coding of news segments by broad content areas (elections, the economy, terrorism, the military). See Oates, Sarah, Kaid, Lynda Lee, and Berry, Mike, Terrorism, Elections, and Democracy: Political Campaigns in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia (London, 2009), 14.Google Scholar Oates and Laura Roselle employ similar tools in their comparison of campaign coverage on Russian state and commercial channels, but they do not use the term framing. See Sarah Oates and Laura Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News: Comparison of Campaign News on State Controlled and Commercial Television Channels,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics b, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 30-51. Ellen Mickiewicz applies a qualitative concept of framing to viewer “trade-offs” in the interpretation of Russian television news, but her emphasis is on the mismatches between audience readings of news stories and the broadcasters’ framings of those stories. See Ellen Mickiewicz, Television, Power, and the Public in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2008). For further discussion of Russian television news frames, see Hutchings and Rulyova, Television and Culture in Putin's Russia, 42-44. For an overview of Russian media and politics more generally, see Ivan Zassoursky, Media and Power in Post- Soviet Russia (New York, 2004).
26. For this account of consensus, see Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), 135.
27. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, 2002), 151-70; Unni Wikan, Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe (Chicago, 2002); Flora Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour, and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (London, 1992).
28. Shnirel'man, “Porog tolerantnosti,” 2:278.
29. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001), 432-61.
30. According to our project data—all news reports relating to interethnic cohesion issues broadcast on Vestiand Vremia from September to December 2010—the formula was not used once between the beginning of September and the second week of December 2010. The only acknowledgement of its existence came in a Vesti report of 20 September 2010 confirming that local Moscow authorities had proposed to name a new street “Alley of the Friendship of the Peoples.” See http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=393883 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
31. Marina Mogil'ner, Homo imperii: Istoriiafizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (XlX-nachalo XX w.) (Moscow, 2007), 358-96; Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 2008), 103-15, 179-82.
32. See E. V Erikson, “Ob ubiistvakh i razboiakh na Kavkaze” (1906), at www. velesova-sloboda.org/antrop/erikson.html (last accessed 21 September 2012). On the European New Right, see Douglas Johnson, “The New Right in France,” in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson, and Michalina Vaughan, eds., Neo-Fascism in Europe (London, 1991), 234-44. Works by Alain de Benoist, the ideologist of the New Right in France, have been translated into Russian on many occasions since 1991.
33. Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym, Soviet-Jewish Emigration and Soviet Nationality Policy (New York, 1983); Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,“/oMrwa/ of Modern History 70, no. 4 (December 1998): 813-61; Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London, 1997), 3, 8, 71-79.
34. For a comprehensive discussion of this issue, see Shnirel'man, “Porog tolerantnosti,” 1:251-90. Particularly important here is Lev Gumilev's racializing perception of “ethnos” as a “phenomenon of nature.” Having been disseminated in print since the 1970s, Gumilev's pseudo-scientific theories enjoy enormous popularity in contemporary Russia. See V. A. Shnirel'man, Khazarskii mif: Ideologiia politicheshogo radikalizma v Rossii i ee istoki (Moscow, 2012), 57-75.
35. Shnirel'man, “Porogtolerantnosti,“2:l09-42.
36. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge Mass., 1993), 57-60.
37. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “The French New Right in the Year 2000,” Telos, no. 115 (Spring 1999): 117-44.
38. V. N. Burlakov, Kriminobgiia: Uchebnik dlia vuzov (St. Petersburg, 2004), chap. 1. In this context, Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” theory is particularly popular among Russia's political and intellectual elites. Russian translations of Huntington's 1993 article and 1996 book were published in 1994 and 2003, respectively.
39. Article 29 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation; part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. See the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation at http://www.ug-kodeks.ru/ (last accessed 21 September 2012). See also a useful discussion by Vladimir Sokolov “K voprosu o razzhiganii natsional'noi rozni” at http://www.m3ra.ru/2010/12/01/inciting-ethnic-hatred/ (last accessed 21 September 2012); and the USSR law of 2 April 1990, “Ob usilenii otvetstvennosi za posiagatel'svo na natsional'noe ravnopravie grazhdan,” at http://www.bestpravo.ru/ussr/data01/texl0976.htm (last accessed 21 September 2012).
40. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, 2001), 77.
41. Richard Arnold, “Visions of Hate: Explaining Neo-Nazi Violence in the Russian Federation,” and Alexander Osipov, “Minority Questions: Ethnicity, Discrimination, and Extremism in Russia,” both in Problems of Post-Communism 57, no. 2 (March/April 2010): 37-49 and 50-60.
42. Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York, 2002).
43. V. E. Bagdasaryan, “Teoriia zagovora“v otechestvennoi istoriografii vtoroipoloviny XIX— XX w. (Moscow, 1999); L. Gudkov, ed., Obraz vraga (Moscow, 2005).
44. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=11.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012). All subsequent references to Russian news broadcasts are from the full recordings archived at the official Web sites of the four channels.
45. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=12.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
46. The adoption of the formulation “person of non-Slavic appearance” internalizes the homogenizing perspective of the very nationalist agitators whose motivations the formulation aims to silence.
47. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=12.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
48. For the prevalence of the “ordinary person” in conflict reporting, see Tamar Liebes and Zohar Kampf, “Black and White and Shades of Gray: Palestinians in the Israeli Media during the 2nd Intifada,” International Journal of Press/Politics 14, no. 4 (October 2009): 434-53.
49. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=19.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
50. Ibid.
51. This representation has become particularly dominant among local politicians following the 2006 Russian-Chechen brawl in the Karelian town of Kondopoga. Shnirel'man, “Porog tokrantnosti, “2:7-29.
52. See www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=19.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
53. For further discussion of how these tensions infiltrate state television, see Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich, Christopher Flood, and Henri Nickels, “The Impact of ‘Islamic Extremism’ on TV News Representations of Multiculturalism, Integration and Mnogonarodnost': A Comparative Analysis,” Russian Journal of Communication 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 43-70.
54. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=19.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
55. See http://www.1tv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=22.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
56. See http://www.ltv.ru/newsvideoarchive/pd=26.12.2010 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
57. As Marlene Laruelle suggests, law-enforcement agents and politicians frequendy resort to such denials. Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 37.
58. See http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=413460 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
59. Ibid.
60. See http://www.vesti7.ru/archive/news?id=22523 (accessed 28 December 2011; no longer available).
61. See an interview with Vladimir Zhirinovskii on REN TV's Nedelia, 18 December 2010, at http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=445:-qq-181210&catid=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September2012).
62. See http://www.novoteka.ru/seventexp/8807764; http://www.lifenews.ru/news/47624 (last accessed 21 September 2012); Netavisimaia gazeta, 24 December 2010, and Kommersant, 25 December 2010.
63. As Vesti nedeli pointed out, Kvachkov's movement styled itself “the Minin and Pozharskii People's Volunteer Mission,” invoking the legendary duo whose names were intoned repeatedly during the November rituals. See http://www.vesti7.ru/archive/news?id=22783 (last accessed 28 December 2011; no longer available).
64. See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=423:-qq-111210&catid=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
65. Spartacus's uprising has featured prominently in Soviet/ Russian historical mythology since 1933. See Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (Basingstoke, Eng., 1997), 80-81.
66. See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=423:-qq-l11210&catid=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
67. It was acknowledged on 18 December that the Manezhnaia riots were replicated in other Russian cities, including St. Petersburg, Rostov, Krasnodar, and Nizhnii Novgorod. Significandy, the 25 December coverage of interethnic tensions in provincial Russian towns that predated Manezhnaia was accompanied anachronistically by footage of the Moscow demonstration.
68. See, for example, the following description of the disturbances by one of REN TV's reporters in the 18 December bulletin: “Here [people] speak about the white race against the background of red fires.” See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=445:-qq-181210&catid=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September 2012). See also Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation, 38.
69. Shnirel'man, “Porog tolerantnosti,” vols. 1 and 2.
70. See S. G. Barkhudarov et al., eds, Slovarrusskogo iazyka (Moscow, 1958), 2:133. Between the 1860s and 1917, the expression korennoi narodvias applied in official and popular discourses specifically to the Russian population. It is this usage, rejected in the Soviet period, that seems to be influencing today's popular understanding of the word korennoi. See Vera Tolz, “Diskursy o rase: Imperskaia Rossiia i Zapad v sravnenii,” in Aleksei Miller, Denis A. Sdvizhkov, and Ingrid Schirle, eds., “Poniatiia o Rossii“: K istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda (Moscow, 2012), 2:180-81.
71. Tolz, “Russia: Exiled, Submerged, Restored.“
72. See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?opdon=com_content&view=article&id=449:-qq-251210&caud=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
73. This is despite the fact that in earlier REN TV broadcasts about edinic conflict and the rise of Russian nationalism, such figures as the leader of the Solidarity movement, Boris Nemtsov, acted as commentators. See Nedelia, 6 November 2010. This program is no longer available on the REN TV Web site, but it can be watched on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeM3jxb05BE (last accessed 21 September 2012).
74. See http://www.nedelya.ren-tv.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=445:-qq-181210&catid=4:nedelya-s-mariannoy-maksimovskoy&Itemid=9 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
75. Ibid.
76. REN TV's program “Reporterskaia istoriia,” broadcast on 9 December 2010. Aldiough we accessed this program on 28 December 2011, it is no longer available on the REN TV Web site.
77. Contributions to REN TV's audience forum ranged from claims that the riots were deliberately organized by Putin in order to strengthen his new bid for the presidency, to suggestions that they were the work of the oligarch Berezovskii as part of his plot to destroy the Russian state. See http://www.ren-tv.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36069&st=0&p=959181&#entry959181 (last accessed 21 September 2012) and, in particular, comments on 17 and 28 December 2010. See also Kirill Rogov, “Temnyi vsadnik na belom kone,” Novaia gazeta, 20 December 2010.
78. See http://www.myvi.ru/ru/videodetail.aspx?video=a28bc00a48724a51b6a22c298df4dab6&ap=l (last accessed 21 September 2012).
79. See http://www.kinolot.com/peredachi/10014-segodnya-itogovaya-programma-yefir-ot-19122010.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Amandine Regamey, “Obraz migrantov i migratsionnaia politika v Rossii,” Antropologicheskii forum 13 (2011): 389-406.
83. See http://www.kinolot.com/peredachi/10014-segodnya-itogovaya-programma-yefir-ot-19122010.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).
84. Ibid.
85. See http://www.kinolot.com/peredachi/6682-segodnya-itogovaya-programma-yefir-ot-26092010.html (last accessed 21 September 2012).
86. Similarly, references made by the Ministry of Home Affairs to Ethnic Criminality are singled out. By contrast, racism among the fans is transmuted into an outburst of spontaneous emotion (emotsional'nogo vspleska). Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. See John Downing and Charles Husband, Representing Race: Racisms, Ethnicities and Media (London, 2005). For an earlier, seminal, analysis, see van Dijk, Teun A., Racism and the Press (London, 1991).Google Scholar
89. Describing the western media's conflation of race and ethnicity, Downing and Husband argue that “the discourses which vilify racism are more than countered by the many discourses through which racism is made invisible, normative and even virtuous … The politics of ethnicity become vulnerable to the discourses of racism and the ideology of'race’ can be effectively disguised and embedded in the language of ethnicity.” Downing and Husband, Representing Race, 1.
90. The symbolic invocations bespeak a genuine threat, as polling data indicates. The All-Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM) conducted a post-Manezhnaia survey in which 11 percent of respondents said they would consider participating in a similar protest action themselves. See http://www.wciom.ru/index.php?id=459&uid=l11221 (last accessed 21 September 2012).
91. Brubaker, Rogers, Ethnicity xuithout Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 10.Google Scholar
92. Ibid, 19.
93. Post-riot headlines in the United Kingdom focused on issues of consumerist greed, youth amorality, parental indiscipline, and police timidity. In one of a later series of Guardian articles published as part of a collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Rowntree Foundation on ascertaining the causes of the English riots of 2011, Hugh Muir and Yemisi Adegoke acknowledge that foreign commentators were quick to brand the events as Britain's “race riots,” but they argue that other factors, including poverty, unemployment, alienation, and distrust of authority, were more important. See “Reading the Riots: Investigating England's Summer of Discontent,” The Guardian, 8 December 2011, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/08/were-the-riots-about-race(last accessed 21 September 2012).
94. Vladimir Putin, “Rossiia: National'nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 23 January 2012.
92. Ibid, 19.
93. Post-riot headlines in the United Kingdom focused on issues of consumerist greed, youth amorality, parental indiscipline, and police timidity. In one of a later series of Guardian articles published as part of a collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Rowntree Foundation on ascertaining the causes of the English riots of 2011, Hugh Muir and Yemisi Adegoke acknowledge that foreign commentators were quick to brand the events as Britain's “race riots,” but they argue that other factors, including poverty, unemployment, alienation, and distrust of authority, were more important. See “Reading the Riots: Investigating England's Summer of Discontent,” The Guardian, 8 December 2011, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/08/were-the-riots-about-race(last accessed 21 September 2012).
94. Vladimir Putin, “Rossiia: National'nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 23 January 2012.